October 31, 2024 - Panama City - Thursday

October 31, 2024 – Thursday              Day 36 of this journey 

Panama City – Happy Halloween! 

We started our day by putting on our Halloween tee-shirts and loading our bag of treats to hand out. Then headed up for breakfast and enjoyed passing out fun-size Snickers and Mars bars. The staff had installed a very inventive display to celebrate the holiday. They are so creative.

We are scheduled for a morning tour and need to be ready to go by 7:45 am. We are taking what is billed as a “Jungle Boat Ride”. When we were here in December of 2022 (at the beginning of that World Cruise), we took this same tour from Colon which is on the Atlantic side. We enjoyed it enough, we decided to do it again. 

We do need to be prepared, however, for rain. It is in the forecast as I mentioned yesterday. The young lady who is our guide begins her spiel and we learn that this really won’t be a “jungle” tour as this area is in a “rain forest”. They do have jungle, but it is on the border with Columbia. 

It takes about an hour or a little more to get to the resort where we will board our boats. They hold a maximum of 20 people, have a simple canopy, a captain, and a guide that will narrate for us and help us spot wildlife. Our guide for this portion is Luis, and we like him a lot more than the young lady we started with. Her dissertation seemed to be mostly a data dump with not much emotion or personal input. 

We leave the resort and as soon as we are out into Gatun Lake, our captain kicks up the speed and we head across the lake at pretty high speed. The rain is at a sprinkle, but with the high speed of the boat, we are all getting wet. It doesn’t take long to get to the area of the lake that is our destination for wildlife viewing. Once at our destination, we quickly find a small group of Tamarind monkeys. They are the smallest of the species that we will see today, and they are small. We will later see Capuchin monkeys (much more aggressive) and even catch a glimpse of Howler monkeys. We also saw egrets, herons, a macaw, iguanas, and other assorted birds.

Tamarind Monkey

The density of the rain forest

A Capuchin monkey on the tree

2 Capuchin monkeys

A bird - a Kite. There were lots of them

These black things on the trunk are bats.

Back at the ship and after lunch, Russ isn’t feeling very well, so we have a quiet afternoon and evening.